Youtube videos on LDS.org

For quite some time now, the internet at my church building has blocked youtube. Then, the church started using youtube videos on its website - making it impossible to show those church videos during a lesson at church. I imagine you don't want to unblock youtube. But, you should then not use youtube videos on the site. Seems a no-brainer. Any plans to fix this inconsistency?

glarcy wrote:For quite some time now, the internet at my church building has blocked youtube. Then, the church started using youtube videos on its website - making it impossible to show those church videos during a lesson at church. I imagine you don't want to unblock youtube. But, you should then not use youtube videos on the site. Seems a no-brainer. Any plans to fix this inconsistency?

The issue of blocked access to Youtube videos from links in LDS.org pages has been an ongoing discussion in multiple threads since 2009. While there are more, these are some of the discussions:
YouTube access blocked
firewall blocking even church related Youtube videos
YouTube Videos
Content Filtering YouTube videos for the familysearch.org site

A more current topic, in which you recently posted, is the Many Church videos blocked when YouTube safety filters on

[Moderator note: This thread was split from the "LDS.org to get major style update, updated header" thread because the topic of that thread is about the style of the LDS.org header and the topic if this thread is bout access to Youtube videos on LDS.org.]

glarcy wrote:For quite some time now, the internet at my church building has blocked youtube. Then, the church started using youtube videos on its website - making it impossible to show those church videos during a lesson at church. I imagine you don't want to unblock youtube. But, you should then not use youtube videos on the site. Seems a no-brainer. Any plans to fix this inconsistency?

We are told not to stream videos during lessons. We should download them in advance. The internet access in buildings is not designed to have a whole bunch of people streaming. Still, I see teachers do it. Sometimes they're successful, and sometimes they're not.

Streaming videos during lessons should certainly be avoided; it is unreliable. But it is sometimes needed. A last minute replacement for a sick teacher may want to show a video, for example. Or perhaps a student question leads to a prompting to show a particular video resource.

I personally wish the Church would either not use youtube videos on lds.org, or make them available through the firewall. This has caused many headaches!

(It's also hard to teach members how to use technology to share the gospel when the technology isn't available in the meetinghouse...)

rsidwell wrote:I personally wish the Church would either not use youtube videos on lds.org, or make them available through the firewall. ... It's also hard to teach members how to use technology to share the gospel when the technology isn't available in the meetinghouse...

My preference of those two options is that YouTube not be blocked at all, precisely because it's a major tool for getting a wide social reach in sharing the gospel online. I'd much rather post an inspiring LDS YouTube video than a page on LDS.org that has an embedded video, and I think people are more likely to watch it natively on YouTube as well. And if the Church hosts all their streaming content on YouTube, I think they'd save a lot of money and resources too.